Streamline Postal And Courier Services With Global Postal Codes

November 15, 2011, Toronto, Canada, NAC Geographic Products Inc. announced the release of NAC Sorter – a software module for mail sorting systems to sort all mail automatically from world level to final household mail boxes, thanks to the power of the Universal Address (also called the Global Postal Code).

Though it has been a long time effort of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) to standardize mailing addresses for international mail, it has little success as traditional addresses evolved from history have deep roots in languages and cultures and are difficult to be translated into standard addresses in the UPU suggested formats, not to mention that 60% of the world population do not have addresses yet.These lead to limited automation in mail sorting and no postal and courier services to many households.

This situation now can be changed with the introduction of the Universal Address that can be used to globalize all addresses. The Universal Address is a highly efficient and human-friendly code mathematically equivalent to longitude/latitude coordinates and available at every location in the world, including locations of all houses, buildings and even temporary camps, and can be instantly obtained with a GPS device such as a smartphone or an online high resolution satellite image map such as NAC Locator. Here are some examples of the Universal Addresses:

Here NAC stands for Natural Area Code, a four character NAC represents a 30×24 square kilometer area like a city, a six character NAC represents roughly a square kilometer like a street block, an eight character one a 35×25 square meter area like a house and a ten character one is one square meter like a door anywhere on the earth. Since an eight or ten character NAC is able to uniquely specify a house or building anywhere in the world, it is also called a Universal Address.

Sorting mail based on the Universal Address is just a simple mathematical problem: finding the area containing the location of the Universal Address from a series of areas defined by the company according to its own transportation and delivery structure, which is independent from languages, cultures and the definition of the postal zones.

For countries with traditional addresses, the suggested globalized address is the traditional address embedded with the Universal Address, for example,

Thus, it avoids the difficult translation of the address so that people used to the tranditional address can still use it as usual, while machines, tourists and people unfamiliar with the language and the traditional address can use the language-independent digital Universal Address as it has a distinct format and can be easily recognized no matter where it is embedded in the address block.

For countries without traditional addresses, the globalized address can be the Universal Address only or the place names plus the Universal Address such as:

Then, all homes in the world have their own globalized addresses. With the globalized addresses on mail and parcels,

all houdeholds, cottages and even temporary camps in the world can get postal and courier services delivered to their doors no matter whether they have traditional addresses or not as they can be uniquely specified by Universal Addresses.

all international mail and parcels can be automatically sorted as the Universal Addresses are worldwide valid.

all courier companies can sort and transport parcels according to their own needs without concerns in changes of postal codes due to the changes of postal services, thanks to the independency of the Universal Addresses from postal services.

mail and parcels in all countries, especially those without postal code systems or without address systems can be sorted automatically, thanks to the pure mathematic sorting algorithm of the Universal Addresses independent from languages and cultures.

postal and courier companies can extend the automation in mail sorting all the way to final mail boxes of individual houses, thanks to the unique Universal Addresses available to all households in the world.

"The release of NAC Sorter represents another milestone in the digital and globalization revolution, " said Dr. Xinhang Shen, president of NAC Geographic Products Inc., "Postal and courier companies now can automatically sort all mail and parcels at all levels with the same algorithm based on the same kind of codes no matter where they are and no matter where the mail and parcels are sent to, eliminating barriers from hundreds of different languages, traditions, postal code systems of the addresses."

Actually, Universal Addresses can be used for all location related applications (postal and couriers services, taxi services, emergency services, maps, navigation, local search, travel guides, geographic information systems, cadastre, land planning, management of roadside objects, etc) with significantly improved efficiency, interoperability and reliability. For example, if you use the Universal Address instead of the traditional address to specify the destination on a navigation system, you can save 80% of key input, avoid difficulty in inputting foreign characters if it is a foreign address, eliminate errors from the outdated, duplicated or missing address and extend the navigation to locations without traditional addresses.

Currently, NAC Sorter is delivered as an ActiveX control for Microsoft Windows based mail sorting software and has been released to two major manufacturers for the integration with their mail sorting systems. We also welcome other manufacturers of mail sorting systems to do the integration to speed up the revolution of the postal and courier services in the world. The software module can be downloaded here. For more information about NAC Sorter, please check http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsorter.asp.